8
(1926–9)
Architecture and Sex
And thou, O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall,
That stand’st between her father’s ground and mine!
Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall,
Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne!
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Eileen Gray’s villa rests on the rocks of the Riviera like a beached liner.
A dark spot bobs in the waters of the Riviera, a puncture wound in the glittering surface of the sea. Slowly the waves return the object to the shore. There, watched over by a villa that had obsessed him for decades, the body of Le Corbusier, the twentieth century’s most famous architect, lies as if sunbathing on the beach. Some have speculated that his death on this glorious August day in 1965 was a suicide. He had become gloomy and withdrawn after the recent loss of his mother and his wife, and he had remarked to a colleague, ‘How nice it would be to die swimming toward the sun!’1 This is not a story about death, however, but of love – and sex. It is the story of Le Corbusier’s mad passion for the house on the cliff and the resentment of the designer of that house, Eileen Gray. Motionless stone may seem the anaphrodisiac opposite of living flesh, but in this chapter I’ll reveal the secret sex life of buildings, their capacity to enflame and arouse. It’s a story about houses made for lovers, structures that thwart love and people who love buildings themselves. Although some of the characters that populate this story – like the woman who married the Berlin Wall – may seem extreme cases, the fact is that our sex lives mostly take place in architectural surroundings. So what do buildings do to our libidos?
Before I try to answer that question, let’s go back to the scene I described above: the sun-drenched beach, the celebrity corpse and, most important of all, the cliff-top villa. Though it was Eileen Gray’s first architectural work, the house at Cap Martin is a superbly accomplished piece of design. Its streamlined white form rests on the rocks like a beached ocean liner, its terraces and windows overlooking the Mediterranean below. The nautical theme continues in the furniture and fittings, which are inspired by the romanticism of holidays on boats and trains – ‘le style camping’ as Gray called it. Everything is cunningly adapted to maximise the available space: drawers pivot rather than pulling out, beds fold into walls, and the whole performs a kind of mechanical ballet. This is architecture brought to twisting, sliding life.
The house is more than just a technical marvel, however; it is also a love poem, a present for Gray’s partner Jean Badovici. The name E.1027 is an encoded combination of their initials: E for Eileen, 10 for J (J being the tenth letter of the alphabet), 2 for B and 7 for G. Paradoxically, by disguising their relationship as an anonymous formula Gray speaks volumes about her secretive and enigmatic personality. Even her close friends had little idea of her inner life, and in later years she destroyed most of her personal correspondence. But although she kept her emotional life to herself it seems she was an adventurous and unconventional woman.
Gray left her aristocratic home in Ireland at a young age for the excitement of Paris. There she studied art and socialised with the expatriate lesbian milieu around Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, forming a romantic attachment with a famous chanteuse named Damia, an extravagant character who was notorious for walking her pet panther on a leash. One of Gray’s most enduring relationships was with Badovici, editor of an architectural review and fourteen years her junior. In 1924 he asked her to build him a house, and after its completion in 1929 the couple spent most of their summers there. The structure is very much determined by its purpose as a lovers’ retreat. The central living room can also be used as a bedroom, a ‘bedroom-boudoir’ as Gray called an earlier dual-purpose room she designed. Its focal point is a large divan that unfolds to become a bed.
On the wall above this piece of furniture Gray pasted a marine chart inscribed with the words L’invitation au voyage, the title of a poem by Baudelaire. The poem’s subject could hardly be more appropriate:
My child, my sister,
Think of the rapture
Of living together there!
Of loving at will,
Of loving till death,
In the land that is like you!
[ . . . ]
There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.
Baudelaire could almost be describing this secluded spot overlooking the sea at Cap Martin. The poem continues:
Gleaming furniture,
Polished by the years,
Will ornament our bedroom2
But unlike Baudelaire’s patinated antiques the furniture in E.1027’s bedroom-boudoir shone with the machine finish of chrome and glass.
Gray had not always been such a technophile; she made her name as a furniture designer creating art nouveau lacquerwork, such as a chair with arms like writhing snakes, a piece later owned by Yves Saint Laurent. She learned the technique of lacquerwork, a painstakingly slow process requiring the application of numerous slow-drying layers, from a Japanese craftsman in Paris. But as the century progressed she moved away from such handcrafted ‘theatricality’, as she later disparagingly called it, turning instead to cuboid forms influenced by the work of the De Stijl movement. In E.1027 her modernist furniture reaches its apogee and starts to evolve into something else – to disappear. At one end of the spectrum her pieces in the ‘camping style’ fold away to become portable and almost invisible, while at the other extreme pieces are built into the walls or seem to become the walls themselves. The furniture playfully re-enacts the transition between her two careers, from interior designer to architect: one grows organically out of the other.
The bedroom-boudoir of E.1027
Her borderline furniture/architecture is embodied nowhere more perfectly than in the screens she designed. Gray made many of these throughout her career, and always used them in her own houses. They were often translucent: some were made of cellulose (an early plastic) and others of wire mesh. One famous example from the early 1920s was made of black-lacquered panels that pivot on steel rods. This piece of furniture developed from a hall she had designed for a house on the rue de Lota in Paris. This room was lined with similarly shaped panels, which seemed, at the end of the hall, to curve inwards and disintegrate. Moving through the space, one had the impression that the building itself fragmented as one moved from the public realm of the street towards its private, inner recesses.
The ‘brick screen’ that Gray developed from this interior was a further step towards mobile architecture: the solidity of a wall disintegrates into manipulable units, allowing the viewer to see through the barrier. In Gray’s work architecture, usually static and opaque, dissolves to become mobile and transparent. Her screens divide – and unite – architecture and furniture, seen and unseen, private and public. The implications of this for sexuality are enormous. Throughout history, architecture has been used to keep sex out of sight, and our sex lives are conventionally hidden between the four walls of our bedrooms. The story of Gray’s house illustrates what happens when these walls begin to break down.
Gray continued her use of screening devices in E.1027, most notably at the front door. The living room is shielded from the building’s entrance by a curved cupboard that prolongs the experience of entering the building. Gray described the journey into a house in sensual, almost erotic terms, as ‘a transition that still keeps the mystery of the object one is going to see, which keeps the pleasure in suspense’. In an even more visceral statement, one that would give Freudians a field day, she said, ‘Entering a house is like the sensation of entering a mouth which will close behind you.’3 Besides prolonging the feeling of penetration, the screen also protects the occupants from the eyes of visitors, acting as a marker for the ambiguity of the central space, which is public and private, both a place for making love and for receiving guests. Three stencilled phrases in the hall seem intended to slow visitors further. By the entrance to the living room is entrez lentement (enter slowly); by the entrance to the service area, sens interdit (a phrase literally meaning ‘forbidden direction’, which also sounds like ‘forbidden feeling’ and perhaps ‘without prohibitions’ – sans interdit); and beneath the coat hooks, défense de rire (no laughing). Gray’s jokey admonitions warn incautious visitors to avoid potentially embarrassing interruptions, but they also seem to hint at the paradisiacal freedoms of her lovers’ retreat, where nothing is forbidden.
One regular visitor at E.1027 was Le Corbusier, a close friend of Badovici. Le Corbusier, as he called himself – he was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret – became the most prominent figure in twentieth-century architecture not least because he was a skilled self-publicist and a tireless promoter of the ‘new architecture’. He was also politically ruthless and willing to work with any regime – including the Vichy government – if he thought it would get things built. His structures span the world, from a museum in Tokyo to an entire state capital in India. Yet despite his global success he developed a lifelong obsession with Gray’s little house by the sea. He wrote a rapturous postcard to her after a stay there in 1938: ‘I am so happy to tell you how much these few days spent in your house have made me appreciate the rare spirit that dictates all the organisation inside and out. A rare spirit that has given the modern furniture and installations such a dignified, charming, and witty shape.’4 This was partly his gratified ego responding to the many Corbusian touches in Gray’s villa. The slender steel columns, or pilotis as Le Corbusier called them, which lift the structure above the ground and which Gray had added at Badovici’s suggestion; the accessible roof; the horizontal windows and open-plan interiors: all these conform closely to Le Corbusier’s ‘Five Points of Architecture’. But leaving aside these formal similarities, Gray’s house strayed quite far from Le Corbusier’s programme. This divergence stemmed from a fundamentally different idea of what architecture should be. She explicitly argued against Le Corbusier’s most famous maxim. ‘A house,’ she said, ‘is not a machine to live in [my emphasis]. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation.’5 In accordance with this principle, she humanised the machine-made sterility of modern design with playful and personal touches such as the chair based on the Michelin Man, the life ring on the terrace and the stencilled puns on the walls.
In a further divergence from Le Corbusier’s canon, Gray did not provide the uninterrupted spaces the master had insisted on. His houses, with their pioneering ribbon windows and open-plan interiors, had a tendency to transparency, and he once wrote that a building should be ‘like an architectural promenade. One enters and the architectural vista shows itself immediately to view.’6 Gray’s buildings are more opaque. Although it has generous ocean views, E.1027 is full of screens and obstructions, making the experience of moving around it labyrinthine and suprising. Gray’s ideal of living was more secretive than Le Corbusier’s. ‘The civilized man,’ she wrote, ‘knows the modesty of certain acts; he needs to isolate himself.’7 The many visual obstacles in E.1027 contrive to provide this modesty while preserving the airiness of the open plan.
By the early 1930s Gray’s relationship with Badovici had become strained. She found his infidelity unendurable and objected to his raucous drinking sessions. Gray was an independent person who refused to be tied down by people or possessions, no matter how close they had once been to her, and so she left the villa she had created at Cap Martin. After she had gone Badovici occupied E.1027 alone, with Le Corbusier his frequent guest. In 1938 – perhaps during the same visit that inspired his congratulatory note to Gray – Le Corbusier asked Badovici if he could add a series of murals to E.1027’s walls. The resulting paintings are garish and jarring, disrupting the calm and balanced spaces of Gray’s original design. The images, which bear more than a passing resemblance to Picasso’s work, depict naked women in erotic poses. Some, inspired by a formative journey that Le Corbusier made to Algeria in his youth, seem to show harem or brothel scenes. A large mural in the living room represents two nude women with a child floating between them. One of these figures has a swastika on her chest – Le Corbusier never satisfactorily denied the charge of Nazi sympathies. What is going on in this strange and provocative painting – is it an imagined birth scene? A reference to Gray’s sexuality?
Whatever their significance to Le Corbusier, Gray – who regarded them as a violation of her creation – was appalled by the paintings. But she was not stung to action until Le Corbusier wrote a journal article on them in 1948. In one passage he damned the house with faint praise: ‘This house that I animated with my paintings was very pretty, and could well have existed without my talents,’ he condescends, adding, ‘The walls chosen to receive nine large paintings were the most colourless and insignificant walls.’8 The insult was compounded by the omission of any reference to Gray. It was not the first time that her name had been erased from the historical record, an instance of the institutional sexism that still plagues architecture, and in succeeding decades E.1027 was often attributed to Badovici alone or even to Le Corbusier himself.
Badovici then wrote to Le Corbusier – at Gray’s request, her biographer Peter Adam surmises: ‘What a narrow prison you have built for me over a number of years, and particularly this year through your vanity . . . [E.1027] served as a testing ground, embodying the most profound meaning of an attitude that formally banished paintings. It was purely functional, that was its strength for such a long time.’ Le Corbusier’s sarcastic reply seems directed at Gray:
You want a statement from me based on my worldwide authority to show – if I understand your innermost thoughts – to demonstrate ‘the quality of pure and functional architecture’ which is manifested by you in the house at Cap Martin, and has been destroyed by my pictorial interventions. OK, you send me some photographic documents of this manipulation of pure functionalism . . . then I will spread this debate in front of the whole world.’9
As nasty as it is disingenuous, his reply contradicts his earlier effusive praise of the villa. It also contradicts an unequivocal statement he had made on the topic of wall paintings. ‘I admit the mural is not to enhance the wall,’ he wrote, ‘but on the contrary, a means to violently destroy the wall, to remove from it all sense of stability, weight, etc.’10
In the same year that this embittered debate was taking place Le Corbusier wrote to Badovici criticising numerous aspects of the building. Tellingly, he particularly objected to the screen in the entrance hall. He called it ‘pseudo’ and suggested that Badovici should have it removed. The screen of course keeps the living room private from the prying eyes of visitors. It seems his murals in E.1027, like his attempt to remove the entrance screen, were intended to render the villa transparent. He painted one mural – ‘a means to violently destroy the wall’ – directly onto the screen itself, incorporating Gray’s stencilled words défense de rire and entrez lentement. By his symbolic removal of the walls, it seems that he intended to look into the house, and with the erotic scenes he painted, he supplied the imagined objects of his voyeuristic fantasy.
Le Corbusier at work on his murals at E.1027 (the scar on his thigh was caused by a propeller in a boating accident)
There is an extraordinary photograph of Le Corbusier at work on the murals. Apart from his pipe he is completely naked, the only known photograph to show him so. His decision to paint these images while nude speaks to the fact that he must have understood the act as a primitive violation of the architectural space. We can turn to another modernist pioneer here, an Austrian architect named Adolf Loos, for an insight into the contested – and surprisingly sexualised – place of wall painting within modern architecture. Loos is a pivotal figure because he was one of the earliest and most vocal critics of architectural decoration, his views heralding the stripped-down, minimalist appearance of twentieth-century design. He was a great inspiration to both Le Corbusier and Gray – Gray’s first architectural design is based on one of his drawings. In his 1908 essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ Loos argues, with his own distinctive logic, that ‘the evolution of modern culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use . . . The urge to decorate one’s face and anything else within reach is the origin of the fine arts. It is the childish babble of painting. But all art is erotic. A person of our times who gives way to the urge to daub the walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate.’11
In his writings Loos placed great importance on the separation of public facades from private interiors. His buildings have plain white exteriors, which in his day were considered scandalously minimal, even naked. His interiors on the other hand employ complex spatial effects and rich materials such as marble and fur to create a feeling of sensual intimacy. Gray’s interiors pick up on this cocooning effect, while Le Corbusier in contrast extends the blankness of Loos’s facades into his interiors, and merges the public and private with his long windows and hybrid spaces, which are neither entirely inside nor outside. In her fascinating book Privacy and Publicity Beatriz Colomina points out that Le Corbusier was very conscious of the difference between his approach to building and that of Loos. He reminisced: ‘Loos told me one day: “A cultivated man does not look out of the window; his window is a ground glass; it is there only to let the light in, not to let the gaze pass through.”’12 In contrast to Corbusian transparency, Loos’s windows are usually obscured by built-in furniture, curtains or screens, devices that Gray would later use to complicate her own interiors. In E.1027 Le Corbusier was willing to tear down such barriers with his own hands.
Le Corbusier was not the only twentieth-century architect with voyeuristic tendencies. Transparency is an ubiquitous feature of modern buildings: from Bruno Taut’s 1914 Glass Pavilion to Norman Foster’s ‘gherkin’, over the course of the last hundred years the traditional opacity of the masonry wall has been gradually abandoned in favour of a diaphanous insubstantiality. There are technological reasons behind this development: innovations in structural engineering such as reinforced concrete frames and cantilevered floors have allowed architects to eliminate load-bearing walls and increase the use of glass and open plan spaces. However, transparency wasn’t simply a side effect of scientific progress. If society hadn’t changed too the glazed public structures of the nineteenth century, such as the Crystal Palace and Paddington Station, would never have become the private homes of today.
Everything that had formerly seemed stable went into crisis after the Industrial Revolution – our relationships, our social rules and our architecture. As Marx wrote of the modern experience, ‘All that is solid melts into air.’ From the outset avant-garde architects understood architectural transparency as a rejection of bourgeois individualism, which had been protected for so long by the ornamented facades of the nineteenth century. ‘To live in a glass house,’ said Walter Benjamin, ‘is a revolutionary virtue par excellence.’13 Pioneers like Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart agreed, and wrote impassioned manifestos prophesying the communal utopia that would result from a world of glass houses in which everyone could see what the neighbours were up to, although at the start of the twenty-first century this sounds more like a totalitarian hell. There was a sexual aspect to this slightly cranky vitalism: nudism was a constant preoccupation, with popular credence being given to the idea (still current in Germany, its place of origin) that the body should be exposed to healthy fresh air and sunlight. And where there’s sex, there’s sexism. Paul Scheerbart’s bizarre fantasy novel of 1914 entitled The Grey Cloth with 10 Percent White describes the marriage of a visionary architect to a woman whose modest grey dresses don’t clash with his pavonine glass structures. The condition of their marriage is that she will be contractually bound to dress drably for the rest of their lives, playing second fiddle to the real star of the show, her husband’s transparent buildings.
After the First World War the ecstatic rhetoric of these pioneers was superseded by a sober objectivity, but the fact was that privacy – and sexuality – would never be the same again. The carefully segregated public areas of the nineteenth-century house – the hall, parlour and dining room – gradually lost their integrity and fused with formerly private spaces, as in the now-common arrangement of the open-plan living room-kitchen-diner. These spatial mutations corresponded to a changing society: large sections of the middle classes could no longer afford servants and so the kitchen was transformed into a site of conspicuous consumption, a communal area in which friends and relatives could congregate to celebrate the rite of cookery, these days elevated on an altar of polished granite worktops according to the word of Jamie Oliver.
New spatial arrangements also corresponded to changing morality: as Victorian prudery gave way, sex ceased to be an unspeakable or invisible act. In the absence of domestic staff, the phrase ‘not in front of the servants’ faded from bourgeois lips, and open-plan living melted the glacial frigidity of middle-class propriety. The process hasn’t stopped. Just as walls have turned to glass, bodies and acts formerly considered private have become unashamedly public, to the point where the previously invisible is now inescapable. Celebrity sex tapes, reality TV shows and Internet porn have irreversibly blurred traditional definitions of obscenity; our every act is observed by the state via CCTV, every online thought monitored by the National Security Agency. Voyeurism has become part of modern consciousness, with an appeal that extends well beyond perverts and bohemian artists. The first architectural expressions of this change were built in the early years of the twentieth century, when architects like Le Corbusier broke down the walls of the modern house, but the story of architecture and sex goes back a lot further than this.
Architecture has always had a place in the stories we tell about love, whether as a setting for the action or taking a more active role. One of the earliest examples of architectural erotica is the Roman myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, the story of a pair of young neighbours who fall in love despite their parents’ enmity. It has been retold countless times – Romeo and Juliet is the most familiar example – its permutations recording radical alterations in the relationship between sexuality and architecture over the centuries. The first known example of the tale is from AD 9, when the Roman poet Ovid wrote of the young lovers,
Now, it so happened, a partition built
between their houses, many years ago,
was made defective with a little chink;
a small defect observed by none, although
for ages there; but what is hid from love?
[ . . . ]
There, many a time, they stood on either side,
Thisbe on one and Pyramus the other,
and when their warm breath touched from lip to lip,
their sighs were such as this: ‘Thou envious wall
why art thou standing in the way of those
who die for love? What harm could happen thee
shouldst thou permit us to enjoy our love?
But if we ask too much, let us persuade
that thou wilt open while we kiss but once:
for, we are not ungrateful; unto thee
we own our debt; here thou hast left a way
that breathed words may enter loving ears,’
so vainly whispered they.14
The wall, stone-deaf and stony-hearted, ignores the lovers’ plea, so instead they arrange an illicit nocturnal meeting by a deserted tomb. Thisbe arrives on the scene first but as she is waiting a prowling lioness scares her away. In her haste she loses her veil, which the lioness – her mouth bloodied from a recent kill and doubtless annoyed by Thisbe’s escape – mauls. Pyramus now shows up and while fruitlessly searching for his lover stumbles across the bloody veil. Assuming that Thisbe has been eaten he falls on his sword. At this point Thisbe reappears and, understandably upset by what has transpired in her absence, stabs herself too.
Besides being a cautionary tale about the virtue of punctuality, the myth centres on the use of architecture as a barrier to sex and warns us about what happens to people who try to overcome it. We can consider the story a sort of origin myth of sex and buildings: it reminds us that one of the roots of architecture lies in the prevention of inappropriate couplings. In many cultures walls have been, and in some cases still are, the proper impediment to improper love, a primordial means of enforcing the marital ownership of women, preventing infidelity, miscegenation and other taboo loves. Although the Roman teller of this tale sets the action in ancient Babylon, with a distinct whiff of classical disapprobation of oriental cruelty, such practices were also true of ancient Athens, the imagined birthplace of Western civilisation. Athenian women could not vote or own property and were hidden away in the furthest recesses of their husband’s homes. There, segregated in a room known as the gynaeceum, they spent their days weaving and child rearing, their monogamy architecturally guaranteed. Meanwhile men hosted their friends in the andron, a public room used for dinners and parties, for carousing with prostitutes and doing business.
The exceptionally high level of political activity among Athenian males was only possible because they didn’t have to work. Democracy was purchased with the architecturally enforced domination of wives, whose labour, along with that of slaves, funded male leisure. The place of women in Greek architecture is perfectly emblematised by the caryatids holding up the porch of the Erechtheion on the Athenian acropolis. These colossal female figures are trapped by their architectural burden, for ever enslaved in order to support the social edifice that constrains them. The fact that caryatids recur throughout Western classicising architecture speaks volumes about the persistence of female subjugation, and when Le Corbusier drew concubines all over the walls of Gray’s house, it was an atavistic act: he was trying to return a woman’s room to a harem, a prison built from male sexuality, a prison that had to be transparent because it was guarded by the male gaze. But he was closing the stable door long after the horse had bolted.
There are a few centuries to get through before women escape their architectural prisons, however – dull centuries when the Church built barriers to sexuality that were stronger than any physical wall. But 1,340 years after Ovid, Bocaccio’s collection of raunchy stories The Decameron bursts like a breath of fresh air into the pious asphyxia of the Middle Ages. In Bocaccio’s reworking of the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe the initiator of the forbidden communication is a bored housewife imprisoned by her jealous husband. Despite the husband’s meticulous precautions, the woman finds a hole in the wall of the marital home, and it just so happens that the adjoining property belongs to an attractive young man. After she gains his attention by dropping stones through the wall, the two begin a whispered relationship. So far, so Greek, but what happens next is decidedly novel. Frustrated by merely conversational intercourse, the woman contrives a plan to get her husband out of the way. Playing on his jealousy, she convinces him that an intruder is somehow getting into the house while he sleeps. Enraged, he resolves to catch this phantom lover by spending every night guarding the front door. While he is there the neighbour crawls through the gap in the wall – assiduously widened by the pair meanwhile – and into bed with the woman.
Bocaccio’s tale shows that the sexual imprisonment of women by men is weakening: the protagonist’s intelligence destroys her architectural bonds and she is free to enjoy her own sex life with impunity. The bawdy tone of the Decameron results from a changed set of sexual rules the keynote of which is an acceptance of the social fact of sexual impropriety that no longer ends in tragedy but in human satisfaction. Society has changed so that individual resourcefulness and wit are more highly valued than medieval piety, and unworkable social mores are revealed as self-defeating foolishness. But though Bocaccio’s wall is more porous than the unforgiving masonry in Ovid’s tale, it is still a wall and the woman is still a captive in her husband’s house.
By the Renaissance things have changed once more: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the story of Pyramus and Thisbe is acted out by a group of ‘rude mechanicals’, much to the amusement – and censure – of their aristocratic audience. These labourers, whether their snotty audience realises it or not, are harbingers of mass society and its democratised art, and their approach to sexuality tells us much about the unstable nature of sex in early modernity. Significantly, the wall in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is animated, becoming an active participant in the forbidden affair. It is a talking part played by a tinker named Tom Snout: ‘This loam, this rough-cast and this stone doth show / That I am that same wall; the truth is so.’
This transformation is an early example of the quintessentially modern process of reification. Reification (in German Verdinglichung, literally ‘thing-ification’) stems from a failure to perceive the forces of capitalism that mould society. Instead of realising that value is created by the work of everyday people, through reification things (commodities) seem to become inherently valuable and to be social actors almost on a par with humans – think of the way markets are described as having personalities, as being bullish, strong or worried. While reification makes man-made objects appear to have a natural life of their own, living people are commodified, objectified, become thing-like, because the only thing they have to sell is themselves – their time, their labour. The result of these apparently contradictory forces is that walls, though built by humans and thus destructible, appear to be God-given barriers that can interact with people on their own terms. So Tom Snout the tinker becomes a wall, his social position literally petrified.
Not only does Shakespeare identify the process of reification right at the dawn of capitalist society, he is also prescient enough to foresee its counterpart in human sexuality: fetishism. Just as walls separated from their place in the network of social production come to life and speak, individual objects or body parts, be it shoes or feet, are separated from the body and stand in for the complete love object. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the wall is no longer a mere impediment; it is an accessory, responding when the lovers enjoin it to open its chink. And in a further development of Ovid’s theme, the love Pyramus feels for Thisbe is projected onto the wall itself: ‘Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall’, he says as he presses his lips against the stone. Thus the wall becomes a fetish. We have regressed in a sense from Bocaccio’s story, in which intelligence overcomes walls. Now the wall has become integrated into human sexuality. This is how voyeurism begins, because for the voyeur the wall is necessary, physically and mentally. He doesn’t want unimpeded vision; he (it is usually he) has to see but remain unseen, divided from the object of his love. So although real walls are being broken down, and they have been since Boccaccio, the architecture of sexual repression has entered into human consciousness.
Shakespeare takes a more psychological approach to the story than Ovid or Bocaccio, his inward turn another symptom of modernity. This inwardness comes to a climax with a different kind of storytelling: the pseudo-scientific narratives produced by Freudian depth psychology. But more revealing than Freud’s discredited ideas about repression and voyeurism themselves is a story he tells in his famous 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’ (in German the word is unheimlich –‘unhomely’ – a telling architectural metaphor). In this work Freud describes an uncanny experience of his own.
Strolling one hot summer afternoon through the streets of a small Italian town, I found myself in a district about whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Only heavily made-up women were to be seen at the windows of the little houses, and I hastily left the narrow street at the next turning. However, after wandering about for some time without asking the way I found myself back in the same street, where my presence had begun to attract attention. Once more I hurried away, only to return there again by a different route. I was now seized by a feeling that I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad to find my way back to the piazza I had recently left and refrain from any further voyages of discovery.15
Freud tells it as if the ‘unhomely’ architecture is willing him to sexual impropriety: the city itself, architectural embodiment of the febrile southern atmosphere, entraps him in narrow streets from which he can only extricate himself with difficulty. But who is really the prisoner in this story? Freud is the captive of his own fear of the female gaze, but he is free to escape back to the piazza, scene of respectable public life. The prostitutes, on the other hand, are imprisoned in their brothels, and could probably not walk through the respectable parts of town without being arrested. The transparency of the windows – as in Amsterdam’s red-light district today – does not ameliorate the fact that these women are just as architecturally enslaved as the caryatids in ancient Greece. This is another demonstration of the fact that architectural transparency is not a neutral strategy but a fundamentally gendered one: men can look in, but women shouldn’t look out. The flip side of male voyeurism is a kind of architectural paranoia, in which the windows of the houses stand in for fear of the female gaze. The returned gaze becomes a more and more regular occurrence in modernity (Manet’s imperious Olympia is a striking case, the outraged reaction to the painting an instance of mass male hysteria) as women cease to be exclusively observed but also observers, and Freud’s ‘unhomely’ feeling is really an expression of male surprise and fear as gender roles shift from their accustomed poles.
This change in gender roles accelerated throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as women fought for and won unprecedented control over their own architectural settings. The battle finds literary expression in Virginia Woolf’s famous essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’. Woolf asks why there have been so few female artists, and comes to the conclusion that this is a question of economics and space, asserting that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’.16 The essay concludes with an explosive outburst as Woolf imagines the final escape from the gynaeceum in acts of multifarious creativity: ‘Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.’17
Tellingly, Woolf’s essay was published in the same year that Gray finished work on E.1027. The first modern building to be completed by a female architect, Gray’s villa may seem to be a ‘room of one’s own’ on a grand scale, and it is certainly a volcanic expression of those long-repressed female creative forces that Woolf describes. But there is a slight complication: as the coded name reveals, E.1027 is not a room of Gray’s own but a house for her and her lover, Jean Badovici. In the end Gray, who felt trapped by the relationship, had to flee this self-built prison, which had the constraints of the relationship built into its plan. In fact she went on to build a house in the Alpine village of Castellar that was finally hers alone, but she eventually left this house too, forced out by the onset of the Second World War. It is probable that she would have left in any case: she once said, ‘I like doing the things, but I hate possessions.’18 The burden of bricks and mortar weighed heavily on her mind and compromised the thing most precious to her, freedom. A room of one’s own turns out not to be the ultimate in self-determination but another trap, where bourgeois interiority (think of Woolf’s streams of consciousness) is substituted for freedom. A room of one’s own is after all a possession, a commodity, a set of walls that separates us from others.
Caryatids from a Venetian edition of Vitruvius, 1511
Brothel in Amsterdam
The fetishisation of architecture appears in these stories as a kind of metaphor for the modern condition of reification, but there are cases in which this metaphor is brought to startling life. In 1979 a woman called Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer married the Berlin Wall, hence her bizarre surname – ‘Berlin Wall’ in German. Mrs Berliner-Mauer is not alone in her tastes, but a vocal member of a group of self-defined ‘Objectum Sexuals’, established by a woman named Erika Eiffel, who is married to . . . well, you can probably guess. The Objectum Sexuals are united by their shared attraction to inorganic objects, especially large architectural structures, although Mrs Berliner-Mauer explains, ‘I also find [that] other manufactured things look good, [such] as bridges, fences, railroad tracks, gates . . . All these things have two things in common. They are rectangular, they have parallel lines, and all of them divide something. This is what physically attracts me.’ Crucially, it is the division that appeals.
This behaviour, the reductio ad absurdum of fetishism, may seem the province of damaged libidos, but it is merely an extreme consequence of the more general tendency identified by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When Pyramus and Thisbe transfer their love to the wall that stands between them, a wall that is for them animated and responsive, they are entering into the Faustian bargain of reification, which animates the world but stills the soul. Mrs Berliner-Mauer is an extreme case, but the Berlin Wall – despite the fact that it cruelly separated many real lovers – had a broader aphrodisiac appeal, as noted by David Bowie in his song ‘“Heroes”’. At first listen it may seem that Bowie is singing about two heroic lovers divided by the Iron Curtain. But listen more closely (and note the quotation marks around the title): he actually describes a pair standing together on one side of the wall, kissing as they imagine the barrier as an eternal, immutable structure, and the possibility of beating the ‘shame’ on the other side, ‘for ever and ever’.
In fact Bowie is mocking the sham heroism of a couple (based on Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti and his West German girlfriend) conducting a love affair on the Western side of the wall. When they kiss they imagine that their love is an act of defiance, but in reality the wall is for them merely an aphrodisiac. Ironically Bowie’s poorly understood song contributed enormously to the romantic image of the Berlin Wall in Western minds, and no doubt hundreds of trysts were conducted to his soundtrack. For Bowie listeners and subscribers to the romantic myth of Cold War Berlin, the Wall merely had to act as a symbolic division. A more physical instance of the aphrodisiac quality of walls occurs in gay cottaging, in which glory holes are used to further anonymise participants in anonymous sex acts.
One can speculate that the use of glory holes – apertures cut through the partitions separating lavatory cubicles – originated in more repressive times when anonymity was necessary to safeguard the reputation of closeted homosexuals, but their continued use reveals that the idea of partition and anonymity has an enduring sexual appeal. Glory holes fetishistically separate the cock from the body, reducing the partner to a pure sexual organ devoid of any human qualities besides tumescence. As with Mrs Berliner-Mauer, the idea of division is crucial here: division between people and division of the body itself. This is a sad indication of the extent to which reification has altered the human soul but at the same time a heartening demonstration of the power of human sexuality to overcome any barrier, even at the cost of that barrier being partially internalised in the process. The irony is that this process of internalisation has corresponded to a tendency of real walls to turn transparent or to melt away from open-plan spaces. The material barriers of our early civilisations have disappeared only to become – after a brief moment of respite before the dawn of modern capitalism corresponding to the period in which Bocaccio was writing – barriers of the mind.
My last example of architectural erotica is a story about what happens when we attempt to demolish these walls rather than live with them. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun describes a woman’s struggle to survive and prosper in the hypocritical and materialistic world of post-war Germany. Although the film can be read as a metaphor for the fate of the Western half of the divided country, the Berlin Wall does not appear itself – instead, other divisive structures stand in for it.
The story begins with Maria’s marriage on the eve of the Allied assault on Berlin. The opening shot shows a framed photograph of Hitler which is blown apart by an explosion to reveal, through the resulting hole, Maria and her partner being married in a registry office. After the war Maria, who presumes her husband to have been killed, must make her own way in the world, and she ruthlessly employs her erotic capital to this purpose, sleeping with anyone necessary to ensure her survival. In the process she rises from the position of a Trümmerfrau – a rubble woman, as the women who scavenged in the ruins of post-war Germany were called – to a secretary and later an executive in a successful West German corporation. Eventually she is wealthy enough to purchase that ultimate symbol of financial independence and bourgeois success, her own home. It is exactly now that she realises that her home is a prison, her apparent rise a hellish descent. In an ambiguous final scene she accidentally blows up her house, herself and her husband by lighting a cigarette after leaving the gas on.
The film ends as it begins, with an explosion and a pile of rubble, Maria once more a Trümmerfrau. But is her death really an accident? Perhaps Maria Braun’s self-immolation is an attempt to finally escape the trap of architecture, which we think we own but in fact possesses us, and which confines our sexuality to the four square walls of bourgeois domesticity. It is an act of what Walter Benjamin called the ‘destructive character’: ‘where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way . . . What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way through it.’19 In Fassbinder’s pessimistic analysis, however, this escape can only come with death.
The final act of my story begins with another explosion. When the retreating Germans bombed St-Tropez in 1944 the flat that Gray had rented in the town, along with most of her drawings and notebooks, was destroyed. The Germans also looted her house in Castellar and used the walls of E.1027 for target practice – Le Corbusier’s image with the swastika was riddled with bullets as if executions had been carried out in front of it. Despairing at the destruction of her life’s work, Gray moved back to Paris. She did eventually build another house in the countryside near St-Tropez, overseeing the work herself at the age of seventy-five, but she never returned to E.1027.
Le Corbusier’s passion for the house was, however, undiminished by the years. He purchased a plot of land overlooking Gray’s villa and in 1952 built a tiny lean-to there, a wooden cabanon, as shepherd’s shacks are called in the south of France. This one-room holiday home was a present for his wife Yvonne, and like E.1027 it is a masterpiece of minimalism. Although everything has been reduced to the bare necessities, the fourteen square metres of floor space do not feel cramped. There is storage space above the false ceiling, the furniture is mostly built in or folds away, and the lavatory, which Le Corbusier maintained was perfectly adequately ventilated, is hidden behind a curtain. There is no need for a kitchen because there is a connecting door to Le Corbusier’s favourite local restaurant, where he and his wife ate every day.
Their shared minimalism aside (and this is a much more spartan version than Gray’s), the enormous difference to Gray’s villa becomes apparent when one considers the windows of Le Corbusier’s cabanon. Unlike the expanses of glass he dictated for most of his projects, the cabanon has two small square windows overlooking the sea. These have folding shutters that are painted with sexually explicit murals of a couple, and on the wall opposite there is a large painting of a bull-man with a giant phallus. It’s a classic case of voyeurism: the windows he insisted on for other people’s houses are for looking into, but his own windows, in the only house he ever built for himself, are one-way apertures for him to look out of. He once wrote, ‘I exist in life only on the condition that I see.’ The cabanon is like a birdwatcher’s hide perched on a cliff, and the images painted on the insides of the shutters, like the murals he painted in E.1027, provide the spectacle he hoped to see, as if they were some kind of sympathetic magic charm.
Le Corbusier’s continued interest in E.1027 did not stop with the construction of his cabanon. After Jean Badovici’s death E.1027 passed into the possession of his sister, a Romanian nun, and eventually the property was sold at auction. Perhaps concerned that any offer he made would attract unwanted attention, Le Corbusier persuaded a Swiss friend, Marie-Louise Schelbert, to buy the building on his behalf. Le Corbusier exerted his influence behind the scenes to ensure that, despite a higher bid from a certain Mr Onassis, she secured the property. Over the following years he insisted that the villa was well maintained by Schelbert, preventing her, for example, from removing the furniture, and he regularly visited the house when staying in his cabanon up the road, until one summer he died on the beach overlooked by the house.
With his death we have come full circle, but the strange tale of E.1027 does not stop at this point. The story does not end, but the tone radically changes: we are no longer listening to a tale of sexual obsession, but turning the pages of a cheap airport thriller. Some time in 1980 a Dr Heinz Peter Kägi removed most of the furniture from E.1027, driving it back to his home in Zürich in the dead of night. Three days later Marie-Louise Schelbert – his patient – was found dead in her flat, and E.1027 passed into Kägi’s possession. Madame Schelbert’s children, suspecting foul play, mounted a legal challenge to the will, but this came to nothing.
According to local rumour, Kägi now began to hold orgies in the villa, seducing local boys with drugs and alcohol, until one night in 1996 he was murdered by two young men in the bedroom-boudoir. The men, who claimed that Kägi had given them gardening work for which he refused to pay, were soon picked up trying to cross the Swiss border and imprisoned. E.1027, long neglected, now fell into ruin. Squatters moved in and the remaining furniture was either stolen or smashed. Numerous attempts to preserve the building failed, until eventually a restoration of Le Corbusier’s murals was effected and the house placed under legal protection. It is a sad irony that it is Le Corbusier’s unwelcome embellishment of the house that led to the final resurrection of E.1027 as an historical monument and today attracts the most attention. After many years of under-funded and widely criticised restoration, however, the villa has still not been reopened.
But what in the end is E.1027 a monument to? It is certainly a fitting monument to the moment when women finally won the power to build, a struggle that, despite the high-profile success of architects such as Zaha Hadid, is still continuing – architecture remains one of the most male-dominated professions. But it also memorialises something more elusive than this, something harder to pin down: a moment of resistance. The internalisation of walls via the twin processes of reification and fetishism may be ineluctable, even though Gray attempted to escape them with her constant peregrinations and fresh starts. Her restlessness complies with that irreducibly modernist imperative, Brecht’s ‘Cover your tracks.’
Go into any house when it rains and sit on any chair that’s in it
But don’t sit long. And don’t forget your hat.
I tell you:
Cover your tracks.
Whatever you say, don’t say it twice
If you find your ideas in anyone else, disown them.
The man who hasn’t signed anything, who has left no picture
Who was not there, who said nothing:
How can they catch him?
Cover your tracks.20
But however many times we leave our belongings behind or escape from unsatisfactory relationships – whether we live in buildings like E.1027, with its transportable camping furniture so suited to the modern condition of homelessness, or out of a refugee’s suitcase like Walter Benjamin – we cannot escape the furniture of the soul, our attachment to things that tie us down. If, however, Gray’s house fails to escape the bourgeois rootedness of the traditional home, it remains a successful resistance to another process of modernity: the radical erasure of walls, of which Le Corbusier was a prime exponent. Corbusian transparency may seem to be a utopian approach to human sexuality, a refusal to accept bourgeois repression. But Le Corbusier’s voyeurism goes beyond this into a quasi-totalitarian transparency that is the opposite of sex – one only has to watch Big Brother or visit a nudist camp to realise how utterly unerotic complete visibility can be. And indeed, after the co-option of architectural transparency by corporations as a symbol for an organisational transparency that does not really exist, the original utopianism of the concept is revealed to be more fragile than the glass from which their buildings are made. Gray’s house – in this sense a halfway home – with its ribbon windows, screens and obstructions, adopts the transparent tendency while simultaneously attempting a heroic yet compromised resistance to its negative aspects. Whether, in our age of webcams, glass towers, CCTV, universally available porn and reality TV, there is any escape from total transparency, is another question.